Free technical books and resources

Recently I’ve been thinking about how quickly technical books go out of date or sometimes just can keep up with the new versions of software constantly being released. I do like holding in my hands a nice printed book and enjoying the process of reading it, but for IT books it’s just a whole different story. You don’t usually need to read the entire book cover-to-cover, most often these books are used as references to help solve a specific problem. And after the solution is found they can lie there collecting dust for months if you don’t run into more trouble that would require you to open it up again. My point is that there are lots of great free books online and I decided to start my own little list of places where they can be found. Now I’m not saying that I know exactly where every little online book is or that it’s the list of the best of them. These are just some of the resources that I personally like. I don’t want to have a huge pile of downloaded books that l will never ever even start reading.

• This one I stumbled upon recently and I think it’s awesome – Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines.  The site even lets you decide if you want to download the whole book (161MB) or read just a specific chapter. I’m interested in usability because it’s just one of those things that sometimes gets overlooked, but for the user it’s the key point of whether he’ll be using your service or your competitors.
• This other book is about the concept of Domain-Driven Design which is in the title of the book. To download this book you will need to register, but other than that it’s free.
• The next one is a site called emedia that you can register on and receive email bulletins. They have quite a few bulletins to offer, for example a nice one is the IT Security bulletin or the Software Developer bulletin. The fun part for me is that you can browse the archives and see all the bulletins that you’ve missed and then check those that interest you. Another great thing is that a lot of them seem to contain links to free eBooks, just pick a topic and go nuts.
• The last one I assume is much better know than the others, but I’m still gonna throw it out there. I just love short and concise cheat sheets for a programming language that I don’t know that well, some technology or just a command-line tool. And what better place to find them than DZone’s refcardz. They have a wide selection and new ones are coming out constantly. You do have to register to get them, but it’s worth it.

• books
• free
• resources